The Slide
by kastaborous1895
Summary: A simple story, a lost companion and strange experiences. Watched


In the end, but before anything has actually happened, things are stuck. Nothing is in the right place, in time or where they should be. If you carry on as usual, your eyes sliding past everything, it could take you forever to notice, if you ever do. But, if you stop and look, really stop and really look, just for a second you can see, or not see, how the world really is.

Life is easy, it slides past and we carry on down the slide to the next minute, the next hour, the next day, leaving the past behind. There is nothing to grab on to, to slow us down. At the top the slide is the most slippery, you haven't had time to work out what you are doing and the gradient is higher, as are the risks. This is where Martha is, just at the top of the slide, slipping with no control into life.

It isn't just her, but how else can this be explained, which it must be. This is the easiest way. For it is fractionally easy to see through somebody else and easier to understand through a story. It is hard to pick out things from live that can be shown to prove how the slide works, so this girl will have to do as an analogy, she lives differently and the story of how she got there is so long, and, though it could teach much, cannot help understanding so will not be written before the urgency of the slide is known.

It could have taken her forever to notice, or perhaps as for most, she never would. That there was something not quite right with how lives pass, that people don't have the control they think they do. When they get glimpses of it they become distressed. The facade is briefly lost, something goes badly and worry, anger and fear make themselves known. When you are young you are controlled and you can see it through your parents. Sometimes you gain control as you become older, sometimes you feel you lose it.

Martha is on her own. A cruel world allows people to be forgotten by everyone that ever knew them, especially a child, especially with no family and no love to stop the memories leaving. Briefly there was control, but it was so very briefly. Now that outside, defined control has disappeared. She is vulnerable to the cracks in the slide, in the smooth passing from one end of life to the other. They suddenly start to grow, causing the journey to falter before it rushes on, sweeping you past.

All the buildings around are grey and harsh, square and with sharp edges, and Martha cannot see the top of them as she walks between. They don't seem to end, and when did they start, did they ever have a beginning or has she always been there, just walking on? Did she ever make the decision to start walking, is she in charge of her legs as they carry her ever onwards? One day she will have arrived, she will have been taken far enough.

For the first few years of life you don't quite realise that you are going through life, that you are on this slide. You fail to recall what you have already seen or to rationally work out if those things are what the world in general would refer to as normal. If most of your life progresses in an ordinary way it is easy to tell when something strange is happening to you. But if your life is spent with extraordinary things happening it will not come as much of a surprise when they continue to happen. Thus Martha, with the weird and amazing, but so completely odd things that have happened to her, can hardly be expected to be worried or surprised when they continue to occur.

Safe is relative. That phrase was used once, it was overheard in a conversation. Martha heard it as she slid past their slides of life. It was a strange phrase, with alien words. Alien to her life. She has been forced into life with no stabilities, no safety switch. What is safe? A place, being with certain people, being where there are no people and you know they can't find you. Martha would probably apply the last on that list to herself, although the word safe would have to be explained first.

In the world belonging to Martha, on her own personal slide that runs so differently to everyone else's, words and meanings are just from experience. No time has ever been given to learning well known definitions or education. No direction has been given towards this and very little is known about their existence. At certain times, for certain people when you look at how their lives have panned out, worrying about how many subjects they have passed seems laughable. Even thinking about is seems out of place, there is no reason to do it so it is forgotten.

These tall, horrible grey buildings seem ever threatening, in a place where the threats are never all conquered, never quite defeated. They are lurking between those skyscrapers, in the spaces you can't see. Martha sees them, deals with those threats, the ones she knows of, and walks on. She always just keeps walking on. She must, she knows that. As long as she knows and remembers to keep going she will be alright. Other knowledge is extra, may help but must always be second. If it becomes most important there is no hope, and Martha might as well give up.

This is the problem with the slide. The slide you can't control. Martha can see the cracks, she gets past them but she knows it is not ultimately up to her to decide what happens, where the threats will appear and when she will have to pause, to struggle and want to carry on to the next crack, to see what happens next.

There is no way to control the slide. No way except for one. If you stop the slide. Give up wanting to carry on sliding, over the cracks, through the fast parts and the slow parts. Stop wanting to keep going on past. It is possible to fall off the slide and keep falling, only by choosing to. No direction, you have gone against the slide, the one that has been set out. Martha is on the slide for now, but she knows where it is going and she knows how to get off.


End file.
